[color:"orange"]At hard difficulty, you'll have GREAT difficulty in JUST successfully hitting your opponents.[/color]

How is your agility? That is what determines your offense and defense, which in turn are used to calculate your chance to hit and be hit. See 'differences between classes' (minor spoilers) for more details.

Playing on normal difficulty, I found a sword with frost on it in the Dark Forest, which made the game a cakewalk. I only used it for a short time, but anything I hit (trolls, lizards, etc) stayed frozen until it died, and at best they could get one hit in on me before I hit them.